Dr. Laura on the Radio

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You’ve all heard stories about kids getting homesick when they go away to summer camp. Well, these days that’s sort of flipped. Instead, parents are getting “kidsick.”

During the summer when I was a kid, we’d have breakfast, leave the house, and then maybe go back again only once that day. We usually bounced around from house to house and rode bikes for hours across acres and acres of farm fields near where I lived. Nobody even knew where we were, and I never knew of anybody who didn’t come home again.

But that was then, and this is now.

Now there’s not a day that kids don’t show up dead. There’s not a day that kids aren’t stolen, molested, or victims of gang violence. There’s just not a day. Neighborhoods are rarely tight anymore, and if they are, it’s out of fear. And if your kids go to the park and you’re not somewhere nearby, you’re probably being irresponsible.

However, there’s a difference between sitting on the side of the playground relaxing, reading, listening to music, or talking to somebody and standing under the jungle gym making sure your precious little bundle of joy doesn’t get dirty or upset by something somebody else says or does. That’s micromanaging. Your precious little bundle of joy has to learn to live in the real world.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t supervise your kids. Macromanaging is really necessary, especially these days with all the sex, drugs, and violence. What I’m talking about is being a helicopter parent and hovering over your kids. For example, when parents send their kids to summer camp, the people who head the camp are now expected to take pictures every day, post them on the camp’s Facebook, and send emails to the parents. If the parents see their kid not smiling, they call the head of the camp to see what’s wrong. That’s micromanaging.

I recently took a call on my show that just stayed in my head. On the surface, it didn’t seem like a memorable call, but it turned out to be. I found it alarming because of how typical the caller’s situation was.

The call was from a mother who had a son in his mid-20s, and he had just gotten fired from working in a pizza parlor (I don’t know what you do to get fired from that kind of job, but he did). The caller’s mother – the grandma of the ne’re-do-well – was dying and said her grandson could have her car, which only had about 5,000 miles on it. She said he could just have it! And just when I was telling the woman she should tell Grandma to please give the car to somebody who would be more responsible, I found out this ne’re-do-well (who doesn’t have a job because somehow serving or flipping pizza is more than he can handle) doesn’t like the car because it’s not cool enough. He thinks it looks like “an old person’s car.”

SPOILED…LITTLE…BRAT!

But his mother didn’t say that to Grandma. Instead, she catered to her son further by selling the car so he could use the money to buy a cooler one.

I remember vividly choking down rage and saying that I was finding it difficult to help her out. In my day, if a car had doors and wheels and went forward, you were happy. I looked up the car online, and saw it’s a nice car. But instead of saying, “Hey, you really have to find somebody else to give this car to. My son’s kind of a loser and doesn’t appreciate it. He’s just not a grownup yet, so let’s find somebody else in the family, who, by virtue of their character and effort, actually deserves and would appreciate it,” Mommy sold the car so he could be cool.

That’s the kind of parenting that ruins children. The parent who gets involved in every emotional ache, pain, and little problem of their kid’s life only hurts their kid and doesn’t help them grow up. That’s why huge percentages of young adults are moving back home instead of making their way somehow. That’s why two-thirds of American children are fat or obese. Mothers sit three feet away from their kids screaming, “Don’t do that! You’re going to hurt yourself!,” instead of letting them hang upside down and run around.

I remember when my kid was little my rule was if it didn’t kill him or somebody else, I would let him do it. I figured that’s the way kids grow into adults and men. I’m not suggesting you allow your kids to run off to the park alone. That’s kind of stupid these days. America has changed dramatically, and it will probably never go back to the way it was. But as far as avoiding being a kidsick, helicopter parent while your child is away at camp, I have a couple ways to cope.

First, don’t be connected to your kid’s camp via the Internet. If they have a Facebook, don’t go on it until your kid comes home. And lastly, do what parents used to do when kids went to camp: spend the time caretaking your marriage and worry less about the kids. You know that saying, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”? Well, just twist it around: while the mice are away, the cats will play.

Just remember this: Being responsible and being worried all the time are two very different things.

If you are in an intimate, marital relationship, you need to be sensitive and appropriate when it comes to friends of the opposite sex because it’s a very complex and delicate situation.

The most important issue you should be concerned about is the safety, comfort, and trust of your spouse. Too many times on my program, I hear from people who care more about their friend than their spouse. To me that’s a dead giveaway that the friendship line has been crossed, whether you’ve been naked with the person of the opposite gender or not.

I want to discuss some ways you and your spouse can be protective of each other, but still have friends of the opposite sex:

What does it look like? If you are getting together for a drink with someone who is on the verge of leaving a relationship, lost their spouse, lost their boyfriend or girlfriend, or is known to fool around, it’s inappropriate. Plain and simple. You’re only fibbing if you say, “Well, I’m just trying to be helpful and solicitous.” Especially if your spouse says they don’t want you to be helpful and solicitous to somebody in that situation and you argue that point, it means you’re interested. Just have the person go see a counselor, a member of the clergy, or family. Your marriage is always supposed to come first.

Be careful of that little “edgy” sexual tension. If either one of you is feeling a little horny about the other, or if you’re touching, talking, or acting a little suggestive, seductive, or over-the-line cutesy toward each other, it needs to be over. If your relationship with a friend in any way makes you question or stress about your boundaries and limitations (which every relationship does at some point), you could be led toward temptation, which will change everything in your universe forever.

You should always make sure you introduce all your friends to your spouse. Have them over for dinner or a barbeque. Have them be familiar with the family, and have everything be on the up-and-up and open. Full disclosure makes it clear to everybody that it’s a friendship – solo time is where the problems start.

You need to socialize with others who are also in committed relationships. People tend to hang with people who share their same values, more or less. So, if couples are friendly with each other and everybody has clarity, then everyone is sharing the same values. Your wife can go with your friend’s husband and do archery while you go do a mini-marathon with his wife. As long as it’s all on the up-and-up and everybody is sharing the same values, that’s the important thing.

Be careful about using the words “sweetie” and “honey.” “Sweetie” and “honey” should be saved for your spouse and should not be used on a friend. Use the person’s name when talking to or about them, and save the lovey-dovey stuff for your spouse.

Give your partner power. In addition to honesty and openness, you have to be willing to give your partner power. If your spouse is really uncomfortable about a particular outside relationship, I recommend you honor that and make the appropriate adjustments. However, if your spouse just freaks out at anybody with the opposite genitals, then that’s an insecurity that has to be dealt with, probably by a professional.

What it all boils down to is that all the choices you make have to be in the best interest of your marriage first. Otherwise, you’re not being nice, and it’s all going to come back to bite you.

I would venture to guess that many of you do not balance work and the rest of your life in a healthy way. There is all kinds of research suggesting you don’t. About 80 percent of working people experience on-the-job stress and about half of them need help managing stress. Considering that stress is the number one health problem in the U.S. today (and one of the main factors contributing to heart attacks), work/life balance should not be taken lightly.

I want to discuss some ways to keep a stress-free work/life balance. Of course, it’s very personal. We all have different lives, different priorities, and different types of jobs. But it doesn’t matter. There are certain concepts that are universal.

The first thing you always have to do, which a lot of you don’t want to admit but really must, is that stress a) takes years off your life, and b) diminishes the quality of your health. It’s not something you can just ignore.

Get your priorities clear. Do something as simple as making a list of all of the responsibilities and obligations you have in a week, or a day. Just make a list. Right now, pull out a piece of paper and start making one. Don’t list things in order; just list ALL the things you’re responsible for. Then decide what is really the most important to you. If you put your family first, then you will be able to turn down a promotion if you realize that the extra money isn’t going to be worth it to you. If it’s your job, then you will focus your entire life around your work, and you can say “bye bye” to free time and fun activities with loved ones. There’s always a choice, and each of us has to make it. When you set priorities, you should prepare yourself for the consequences of the choices and be OK with them. If you’re not OK with them, then you really haven’t made the choice.

Next,don’t try to focus on too many things at the same time. You may want to be a fabulous parent or cook, have the hottest body around, spend tons of time with friends, complete 14 different projects around the house, do charity work, visit with family, etc. But you can’t do it all! Sorry! You’re basically going to have to make some choices. You have to prioritize your activities, learn how to compromise, and let people know the limits of what you’re willing to do so you don’t get all crazed. Just do one thing at a time. For all you Type-A personalities, this is something you’re going to have to learn because the result of doing a million things at the same time leads to stress, low productivity, over-exhaustion, and burnout.

Whatever it is you’re doing, you should be in that moment and no place else in your head. I have learned this lesson quadruple times over when learning to shoot pool (which I still contend is the most difficult thing I do in life). With the tip of a stick, I hit one ball, which then has to move and hit another ball at just the right angle to put it in the pocket. If I don’t hit the ball exactly in the center, or don’t move my body, it won’t work. I have missed straight shots by 6 inches because my head was someplace else. It is amazing to me how much learning to shoot pool teaches you about life. I realize when I’m deciding which ball to hit, how to hit it, and where the cue ball should end up, that better be the only thing on my mind. I can’t be thinking about my program, my hair, my family, or the dogs – I can’t be worrying about anything. To put it simply, I have to invest everything I have right into that moment. It’s called “focus.”

So, when you’re with your children, with your spouse, or at work, that’s where your head should be. No matter where you are and what you’re doing, that’s the only place your head should be. That’s what cuts down on stress. When you’re trying to subdivide your attention, you don’t do anything well, and that’s stressful in itself.

Cut out unnecessary activities.Unnecessary activities clutter your schedule and steal precious time from the activities that you need to do and truly enjoy doing. Sometimes you folks waste a lot of time in front of the TV, or you spend a lot of time on social media nonsense. Once you get your priorities clear, it should be easy for you to spot what’s unnecessary. A curtain has to come down between the activities you love to do and the things you need to toss. That recently happened to me. I dropped an iron curtain and cut an activity out of my life. It freed me up to do other things.

Protect your “non-work” time.Your free time is an asset that you should protect at all costs. When we work, we usually have a certain number of hours allocated to working. For some reason when it comes to free time, we forget how important it is. It won’t bring you extra income, it won’t get you a promotion, but it will make you a happy and balanced person.

A good 30 years ago, a major metropolitan magazine section was going to do a whole profile on me and all of my activities, which there have always been many. When the piece came out, one of my competitors went on the radio the next day and boasted that they did not fritter time away with such activities, but only focused on work (as though that were a good thing?!). I thought that was hilarious because your non-work time is really important to your self-esteem, your well-being, your health, cleansing your mind, and having fun. Life is not supposed to be just a work farm. Enjoyment in life is part of living. It makes you a more well-rounded person, and it’s better for your physical health as well as emotional health.

I am ferocious about protecting non-work time. It’s sacred time for me, the same way work is sacred time.

Declutter.The more junk you have around your house, on your desk, or even on your schedule, the more projects you immediately envision ahead of you. When you start panicking, “Oh my gosh, I have to do that and that and that,” you have too much clutter. Declutter your schedule by getting rid of unnecessary activities. Also, declutter some part of your house every week. I recently spent time going into my knitting/sewing room, tearing it apart, and putting it back together. The projects had piled up to the point that I couldn’t work in there anymore (when you go into a room and see 10,000 things to do, more often than not, you’re just going to turn around and walk out). But now that I’ve straightened up, I can work in the room again. Cleaning and straightening up is not the most fun thing in the world, but when it’s done, it looks pretty. And now I’ve even started a new project in there, which I could not have done in the midst of the clutter.

Be great at your job. One of the secrets to a good work/life balance is actually appreciating the work you do. If you absolutely hate what you are doing then you probably will be off-balance. Even if there are a lot of things you don’t like about it, if there’s at least something you do appreciate, then you’ll be able to produce results and generate ideas. However, if you’re not doing the work you feel you were meant to do, you had better shift. If you have a lot of responsibilities or don’t have the freedom to make the shift, then you’re probably going to have to re-prioritize in your mind and make, for example, your family the most important. In that case, work will shift to protecting, preserving, and providing for your spouse and kids. And that’s something you can do well and take pride in.

As you can see, it really all comes down to this: work/life balance is just about attitude and making choices.

Many of you aren’t parenting in the best interest of your child. Instead, you’re parenting to satisfy your own needs.

I get too many calls on the topic of having low self-esteem. And that’s probably because there are a lot of parents who have no concept of how to help their kids develop a positive attitude about people and life. You see, a lot of parenting comes from the “hurty” places: “I didn’t have a lot of freedom, so I’m going to give my kid total freedom,” or “I didn’t have a lot of freedom, so I’m not giving my kid any freedom.” Instead of thinking about the needs of the child and what’s really healthy, parents make it all about what I experienced. They think things like, “He looks a lot like my ex-husband, so I can’t stand him.”

Parents conjure up all kinds of things from ugly places. They lament to themselves, “My kid isn’t perfect, my kid has some kind of handicap or problem, my kid’s not pretty, my kid’s not athletic; my kid’s not this my kid’s not that.” But at the root of all their complaining is just their narcissism not being fed.

The whole “I look good through my children doing something” idea is the same mentality that creates groupies. Girls go hump stars and sports figures and they think they’ve made themselves into something. That’s all that’s about. I had a wonderful conversation a while ago with a young woman who called with, again, a self-esteem question. I asked her, “Well, how have you earned it?” Her only comeback was, “I know how to have fun.” Well, I’m sorry. We don’t respect ourselves because we know how to have fun. Don’t misunderstand me, I think it’s healthy to know how to have fun, but that’s not how you respect yourself.

So, a lot of mistakes parents make with their kids come from them still being mucked up by their own pain. That’s why I think it is really important to have six months of premarital counseling before people decide to marry because they learn a lot about themselves, the other person, their needs, their fears, their desires, and their problems, and they learn how to resolve things, move forward, and mature. It’s more likely that the marriage will work.

Considering this further, I thought maybe you could apply this rule to having a baby. Maybe people should go into counseling for six months before they have a baby, or if they get pregnant, perhaps that’s when the therapy starts. In pre-baby therapy, you can talk about what happened in your childhood, what feelings you have about your husband or wife with respect to having a kid, and put everything on the table. It’s amazing how much better you both can deal with things once the air is cleared.

And that’s why I’m so blunt on my satellite radio program: I’m trying to role model for all of you how to put even the ugly stuff on the table. Because once we take a clear look at it, it has less power over us. What you try to suppress is what has power over you. I’d like you to be the master, not the slave to your history and emotions.

So, this is why I recommend counseling when you’re thinking about getting married, and when you’re considering having a baby. A lot of stuff is never discussed when you’re dating. I mean who discusses diapers when they’re dating?

If you are bored or not happy in life, the key is having a passion. If you want to transform your life and feel meaningful on the face of the earth, you need to have a point to your life. It could be your job, your career, or your hobby, but it needs to be something that you are simply absorbed with. And I’m not talking about obsessive-compulsive: I’m talking about a passion, something you love doing.

I talk to so many young people in their 20s immersed in some very sad state, going nowhere, and feeling a lot of pain and confusion about life or a relationship. I typically ask, “What’s your dream?” I’m amazed at how almost 100 percent of the time I get nothing back. Children are not being brought up anymore to imagine there’s a point to their lives and something they are talented at that they need to commit themselves to. Their job should be to maximize it, respect it, be patient with it, water, fertilize, grow it, and let it bloom. People who do that are typically not depressed, sad, exhausted, or bored. There is something about a passion and a purpose that makes people live longer. When people give up on life, they usually give up on living in a general sense. So, it’s really important you know what your passion is.

How do you find your passion?

One cute way is to ask people who know you, “What do you think is my thing?” A lot of times you will ignore what you have a knack for because you grew up in a family where somebody said it was stupid, or you figure you can’t be great at it and you definitely can’t make money with it.

I have a number of passions, and they really save me when bad things happen. My biggest passion is my radio program. I’ve been doing this for a span of 35 years. I can’t imagine not doing it. Sometimes people say, “Don’t you just want to retire so you will be able to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it?” Well, I sort of do that now because my radio program is my biggest passion.

I feel very fortunate to be able to exercise my biggest passion. And it was by total accident. I was off being a scientist when one day, I decided to call into a radio program. They liked what I had to say so much that I was asked to be on the radio show once a week for a year. I then decided I ought to know more about what I was talking about so while I was teaching full time, I enrolled in a marriage and family therapy program at USC. It was then I discovered something I never knew before: I had the ability to hear and put things together in a way which proved valuable in helping people with their problems. I didn’t know I had that in me. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I wonder if people who knew me then thought so as well.

So, I came upon my passion accidentally. And of course, I’ve added a million other things, and the crafts I go crazy over.

Additionally, using your passion to contribute to the well-being of others is seemingly simple and not very complicated. For example, the daughter of my friend who just recently died is going to start a charity association where women who are dealing with cancer can go to beauticians to have their hair and nails done to make them feel better. It’s a small thing, it will never be made into a movie, and most people won’t even know about it, but other human beings will be made happier. I think that’s huge. It’s like ripples in the water – if you make one person happy, that in turn affects the people in their own house, and then those people impact others, making them happier.

I found a list of 15 questions that you can ask yourself to help discover your passion and life’s purpose:

Simple Instructions:

Take out a few sheets of loose paper and a pen.

Find a place where you will not be interrupted. Turn off your cell phone.

Write the answers to each question down. Write the first thing that pops into your head. Write without editing. Use point form. It’s important to write out your answers rather than just thinking about them.

Write quickly. Give yourself less than 60 seconds a question. Preferably less than 30 seconds.

Be honest. Nobody will read it. It’s important to write without editing.

Who inspires you most? (Anyone you know or do not know. Family, friends, authors, artists, leaders, etc.) Which qualities inspire you, in each person?

What are you naturally good at? (Skills, abilities, gifts etc.)

What do people typically ask you for help in?

If you had to teach something, what would you teach?

What would you regret not fully doing, being or having in your life?

You are now 90 years old, sitting on a rocking chair outside your porch; you can feel the spring breeze gently brushing against your face. You are blissful and happy, and are pleased with the wonderful life you’ve been blessed with. Looking back at your life and all that you’ve achieved and acquired, all the relationships you’ve developed; what matters to you most? List them out.

What are your deepest values?

What were some challenges, difficulties and hardships you’ve overcome or are in the process of overcoming? How did you do it?

What causes do you strongly believe in? Connect with?

If you could get a message across to a large group of people. Who would those people be? What would your message be?

Given your talents, passions and values. How could you use these resources to serve, to help, to contribute? (to people, beings, causes, organization, environment, planet, etc.)

I hear this question a lot. I get calls from parents saying, “My kid is a perfectionist. When they lose a game, don’t get chosen for something, or somebody doesn’t like them, they go bonkers.”

Adolescence is tough enough; you’re not a baby, you’re not an adult…you’re just sort of in a swing state. And what makes the adolescent swing state painful is when young folks are inclined to be very hard on themselves after some frustration or disappointment. You’ve probably heard this at home: “I’ll never learn! I’m stupid! I can’t do anything right! No one likes me! I don’t have any friends! I’m such a loser! I hate myself! I wish I were dead!”

Doing poorly or not doing as well as they wanted triggers a belief that they deserve the self-inflicted bad treatment. And a lot of people take this feeling all the way through adulthood. They feel obligated to come down on themselves.

Where do they learn this?

Oh I don’t know, let me think…

…From their parents! Not always, but generally. They either learn it from a parent who’s blatantly role modeling that behavior, or just from a very critical parent. And then these young people spend most of their time hating themselves for any perceived failure, big or small. “The parental rule of ‘judge and punish’ carries on.” They beat themselves up out of habit, not because they want to motivate themselves, do better, or change.

So, a lot of the time kids learn self-critical behavior from having a parent or two parents who they could never please, who thought criticism was the best motivation, or who felt that expressing dissatisfaction was motivating. But parents are not always the culprits. Some kids get it in their heads that they just have to align themselves with an unreasonable set of expectations. Maybe it’s from sibling rivalry stuff, something happening at school, or just moon spots…who knows. In any case, parents really need to help them.

Here are a handful of triggers that cause kids to get down on themselves, and how you can motivate them to go in another direction:

* Losing a game or contest. In a kid’s head, they think, “I have to win or I’m a loser.” Oh my gosh! Nobody wins all the time. How could they? Also, by following that logic, if you win and someone else loses, that means they’re a loser. And of course, that’s not true. Probably the most important thing you can teach your kids is that winning and losing are exactly the same. Rudyard Kipling said that, except much more eloquently in the poem If. You should approach winning and losing the same way – calmly.

It took me years to learn this while playing pool. If I made a great shot, I’d be bouncing around the room. But if I missed a shot, I’d start muttering things to myself like, “I’ve been practicing this for three hours, and I’m still terrible,” “I’ll never learn this,” and “I suck at this game.” I couldn’t tolerate missing. And I know exactly where that reaction came from. It was parental. I didn’t make it up myself. I can really understand when people get into that mode because I personally had trouble getting out of it. However, now when I make a good shot, I just say, “That felt good, let’s try to create that feeling again.” And if I miss a shot, I think, “I didn’t go through my whole routine, or I adjusted my aim while I was taking the shot. Hopefully I’ll get another shot at this, and I’ll do better.”

You have to teach your kids that it’s best to expect you’re going to win some and lose some, just like the person on the other side of the game.

* Making a mistake. A kid thinks, “I have to get things right or something’s wrong with me.” Show your kids the problem with this mindset by role modeling the correct attitude. If you make a mistake while doing something, stop and say, “Aha! I think I know what I did wrong.” They’ll see you analyzing the error and remedying it for next time rather than going on an incomprehensible tirade about how mad you are at yourself.

* Failing to perform well. Many kids believe they have to be a success to avoid shame. However, in life, you can control your effort, but you can’t control the outcome. The result is not entirely up to you. For instance, things are handicapped or there are politics involved. Or people cheat, even on the highest levels, which can be seriously demoralizing because cheating seems to pay off when people get away with it.

So, you have to teach kids that everything in life is not on an even playing ground, and if they fail to do well, it’s not completely their fault. They can’t always control the outcome because there are too many other factors that have absolutely nothing to do with them.

* Getting in trouble. A kid thinks, “Since I did this wrong, I’m a bad person.” If you have a propensity for doing bad things, then yes, you probably are a bad person. However, kids do stupid things, they test limits, and they don’t think things through – their brains just aren’t ready to do that. They do dumb things but it’s not the same thing as being a bad kid, unless they do it continuously. So, it’s best to teach your kids that if they do something wrong, they should take responsibility, pay their dues, and then forgive themselves. Instruct them to move on and not repeat it.

* Getting criticized. A kid thinks, “Oh my gosh, everybody has to think well of me or I’m inadequate, inferior, or horrible.” That’s the point where you can remind them just like they’re not going to be a fan of everyone they know, certain people will not like them. And it’ll be for reasons that may have very little to do with them. It could be because they look like somebody from the other person’s past who upset him or her. The other person could be jealous of what they have, who they are, and what they’re like. It has nothing to do with your kid being a bad person.

* Being left out. This is one of the tougher ones. At some point your child will probably say something like this: “I wasn’t invited to the party,” or “I wasn’t asked to be on the team.” Tell them that just like we don’t want to be with every group, every group doesn’t necessarily want to be with us. Or as Groucho Marx put it, “I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.”

Do you know how many people have called my show over the last 3 1/2 decades to tell me they could do the right thing in their lives if they only had self-esteem?

A LOT.

People use low self-esteem as an excuse all the time:

“What made you do this thing instead of another?”
“Low self-esteem.”

“How come you stayed with a guy who pummeled you?”
”Low self-esteem.”

“How come you quit X, Y or Z?”
“Low self-esteem.”

But that answer is wrong, wrong, wrong! It’s backwards – it’s making bad decisions that creates low self-esteem, not the other way around.

Healthy self-esteem is like a tennis racket: if you hit the ball too close to the edge, it’s bad, but if you make contact with the sweet spot, it’s perfect. High self-esteem is “a sweet spot between an unhealthy level of narcissism and harmful self-criticism.” It’s right in the middle. However, you don’t need self-esteem to change your actions, habits, or temptations.

A lot of you have very bad habits, like eating at 10 o’clock at night, not cleaning your teeth, speaking before your think, and succumbing to temptations like cookies, cigarettes, and booze. But you absolutely do NOT need self-esteem to change any of them. What you need is a thing that gets put down, dissed, and discounted all the time: good old-fashioned willpower.

And where does willpower come from? You have to pick a motivator. Your motivators are the values and goals in life that are important to you. Once you have them lined up, you can change a habit no matter how much self-esteem you have. Whether it’s dying from continuing to smoke or drink, losing weight, wanting to be a good role model, or being religious, whatever you decide is your motivator has to come out of your head, not out of the universe. It’s something you decide. Just ask people who have quit smoking or drinking, and they will tell you it was willpower, not self-esteem that made them quit. Certainly when they were drunk and had to smoke 135 cigarettes every five minutes, self-esteem wasn’t an issue.

So, it’s all about willpower. It’s not a big deal if you don’t have self-esteem. It is not correlated to success, willpower is. People with willpower have self-control and self-discipline, which helps them build better relationships, take initiative, and sustain their efforts over time. And when you use willpower to accomplish something, you can say to yourself, “I did that!” When you can impress yourself by achieving a goal and cheer yourself on, you begin a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious one. Because if you successfully change a habit, then you give yourself more self-esteem, and it just keeps on going in a circle.

I can’t believe The New York Times, with its hugely liberal perspective, actually published an article on the downside of shack-ups. I was stunned. The article, titled “The Downside of Cohabitating Before Marriage,” gives some stats that are simply mind-boggling:

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages – and more likely to divorce – than couples who do not.

The issue lies in the shack-up itself. When people decide to get engaged, there’s a lot of thought involved. They realize, “Oh my gosh, I’m making a commitment.” They talk about babies and families, and where they’re going to live. None of that occurs when people shack up. There’s no decision-making, only sliding. Shack-up couples slide from dating, to having sex, to sleeping over, to bringing their things over, to being there most of the time, to shacking up. There are no concrete decisions with rings and ceremonies and families involved. The two people have not and do not talk about what they want, need, and expect from each other.

The article also discusses how cohabitors often have different, unspoken – even unconscious – agendas:

Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

You can see right there that shack-ups are just convenient and comfortable. There is no desire for a connection on a deeper level. A lot of people think, “Well, living together reduces costs. It’s easy, and there’s no real risk. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just break up.” EXCEPT, they’ve already bought furniture and pets together. A couple that thinks, “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t,” is not as dedicated as a one that says, “We do, we’ll commit, we’ll make it happen.”

It’s important to discuss everybody’s motivation: “I’m shacking up with you because…” or “My expectation is…” As I’ve always told people on the show, you cannot have any expectations when you shack up. It’s not a commitment. Either one of you can do whatever you want at any given time, so expectations of marital behavior are silly, foolish, and self-destructive. This is why there’s more mental illness, violence, and breaking up when people shack up. Women especially start having more anxiety and depression. They also experience more battering because their partners take their frustration and annoyance out on them.

Shacking up is not an intentional step — it’s just convenient. There’s absolutely nothing of depth that people can count on.